I am a faculty member with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. My research explores the interplay of language, cognition, and computational intelligence with a focus on lexical creativity. Natural language relies on a finite vocabulary to express an unbounded set of ideas. I am interested in how humans construct the lexicon to convey emerging meanings through time and in different cultures. I take a computational approach to characterize the cognitive foundations of lexical creativity and the functional principles of lexicons across languages. I also develop computational methods for understanding diachronic processes such as semantic change and moral change.
Note: I will not be taking any new PhD students in the academic year 2024-25.Sample publications
- Brochhagen, T., Boleda, G., Gualdoni, E., and Xu, Y. (2023) From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity. Science, 381(6656), 431-436.
- Ramezani, A. and Xu, Y. (2023) Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models. In ACL, 428-446, Toronto, Canada.
- Hahn, M. and Xu, Y. (2022) Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality. PNAS, 119(24), e2122604119.
- Prystawski, B., Grant, E., Nematzadeh, A., Lee, S.W.S., Stevenson, S., and Xu, Y. (2022) The emergence of gender associations in child language development. Cognitive Science, 46, e13146.
- Yu, L. and Xu, Y. (2021) Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining. In EMNLP, 920–931, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
- Xu, A., Stellar, J.E., and Xu, Y. (2021) Evolution of emotion semantics. Cognition, 217, 104875.
- Sun, Z., Zemel, R., and Xu, Y. (2021) A computational framework for slang generation. TACL, 9, 462-478.
- Ferreira Pinto Jr., R. and Xu, Y. (2021) A computational theory of child overextension. Cognition, 206, 104472.
- Habibi, A.A., Kemp, C., and Xu, Y. (2020) Chaining and the growth of linguistic categories. Cognition, 202, 104323.
- Xu, Y., Liu, E., and Regier, T. (2020) Numeral systems across languages support efficient communication: From approximate numerosity to recursion. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 4, 57-70.
- Xu, Y., Duong, K., Malt, B.C., Jiang, S., and Srinivasan, M. (2020) Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages. Cognition, 201, 104280.
- Xie, J.Y., Ferreira Pinto Jr., R., Hirst, G., and Xu, Y. (2019) Text-based inference of moral sentiment change. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, 4654-4663, Hong Kong, China.
- Ramiro, C., Srinivasan, M., Malt, B.C., and Xu, Y. (2018) Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses. PNAS, 115(10), 2323-2328.
- Kemp, C., Xu, Y., and Regier, T. (2018) Semantic typology and efficient communication. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4, 109-128.